Hello yarn-lovers!
A couple of weekends ago we teamed up with the village haberdashery to host a knitting workshop in order to raise money and awareness for Refuge. Refuge is a UK charity that specialises in the skills required to help survivors of abuse and violence. They play a huge role in getting women and children back on their feet, so that they may live without fear of violence and abuse.
The workshop was hosted in The Village Haberdashery’s lovely shop, its packed full of every crafter's kryptonite, fabric, patterns, notions and yarn, lots of lovely yarn! They host a plethora of events and workshops in the shop and the adjoining workshop space which is light, airy and very inviting, we would totally recommend checking out their website for all the listings.
The workshop was focused on our new Farled Fascination Scarf pattern which is a great project for confident beginners to learn multiple new techniques and skills. But before we even got started on the pattern we had an important decision to make, colour choices. We provided all the yarn for the knitters to choose from and we had some great bold choices.
With the Farled Fascination Scarf it is quite important to choose contrasting or a lighter and a darker colour otherwise the geometric pattern has a hard time popping.
Technique 1.
So for the cast on we opted for the long tail type as it was new to most of the group. To figure out the tail length for the cast on we wrapped both strands of yarn around the needle 10 times to see how much yarn was needed for 10 stitches and then whilst holding this length, doubled it 3 more times to acquire enough yarn for the amount of stitches to cast on. Then we were off, long tailing like we had never long tailed before. To see a video of how we do our long tail cast on please head over to our YouTube channel for tutorials!
Technique 2.
Marling two colours together is very simple but effective giving real tonal texture to the scarf, this is the exciting part as you can see how your two chosen colours come together. We then came to the geometric section, here we suggested choosing the colour that looks the least like the two colours marled together so that there is more definition between the two sections.
Techniques 3+4
Because we switched colours and dropped one of the strands as we moved to one colour we would have long sections of unworked yarn behind our knitted section when we start to use both yarns again, we call these floats. To stop these floats catching and to neaten it up we need to catch these floats. We do this by simply wrapping the unused yarn around the working yarn once (not too tightly otherwise it will gather in your work), take hold of the working yarn again and carry on, simple!
Once the first section of colour work is complete we then moved on to creating the square/rectangle in the middle of the geometric section. We used the other colour of yarn for this section, hopefully, something that pops out and creates a nice contrast! For this section we simply just drop the 1st colour and pick up the 2nd making sure not to pull the 2nd colour too tightly otherwise it’ll bunch up your work. We don’t need to catch the float on this section as there aren’t that many stitches.
Technique 5.
Casting off. Any of your favourite cast offs is fine for this pattern, it doesn't have to be stretchy so feel free to pick something a little more decorative! As long as you can attach some fringing you are good to go.
Technique 6.
Fringing! We found the easiest way to maintain the same length for all your tassels/fringe was to wrap your yarns around a book or something similar that is the length you would like your tassel, the same amount of times as you need tassels (i.e for this pattern we cast on 43 stitches so we would wrap the yarn around 43 times) then simply cut along the spine of the bookkeeping the tassels folded over. Take a crochet hook and poke it through one of your cast on/off stitches, hook the middle (folded part) of the tassel and pull the loop through a couple of inches, then grab the four loose ends and thread them through the loop, pull them tight and voila!
Once all these techniques had been explained and grasped it was simply a matter of repeating the process, having a natter and eating a few biscuits!
We had such a great time and it was an honour to be part of such a great cause!
Happy crafting!
QF x